They spent most of the summer and fall wandering around western Arkansas. Many scholars believe they may have traveled up the Arkansas River almost to eastern Oklahoma before going into their 1541-42 winter quarters in a town (Autiamque) once again commandeered from the Indians. Though the weather was severe, the men stayed fairly snug. Their slaves built a strong stockade around the camp and dragged in ample supplies of firewood. Local Indians provided them with buffalo robes to use as overcoats and to sleep on, and showed them how to snare the rabbits that frequented the nearby cornfields.

During the long days inside the stockade, De Soto at last faced up to his situation. He had lost half his force. Not all had died in battle. A few, despairing of seeing the end of the quest, had deserted to live with the Indians, and the number would increase if he persisted in wandering as he had been doing. Of the original 223 horses, only 40 remained, most of them lame for want of shoes. The death of Juan Ortiz that winter deprived him of his best, if very uncertain, means of communication with the Indians. Reluctantly he decided to turn back to Mississippi. There he intended to build two brigantines and, manning them with his most trustworthy men, send one to Havana and one to Pánuco in hope that one would be able to lead reinforcements back to those who would wait for them at the river.

They reached the roily Mississippi somewhere near the mouth of the Arkansas River. By that time a deadly fever, perhaps malaria, was gnawing at De Soto. Knowing death was near and bitterly resenting the arrogant hostility of the Indians with whom he tried to treat in his extremity, he ordered two of his captains to go out with lancers and infantry and make an example of the nearby town of Anilco. Not expecting an attack, for they had not been among those taking the lead in defying the Spaniards, the unarmed townspeople clustered about in curiosity. A wanton butchery followed. “About one hundred men were slain,” wrote Elvas. “Many were allowed to get away badly wounded, that they might strike terror into those who were absent.” Eighty women and children were taken prisoner.

By the time the bloodletting was over, De Soto could not rise from his bed. After confessing his sins and making his will, he named Luis de Moscoso as his successor. On May 21, 1542, he died.

To keep the Indians from knowing the fate of the great Child of the Sun, as he had been describing himself to them, his followers buried him near the entrance to the town and rode horses back and forth to destroy signs of the digging. The Indians were suspicious, however, and so Moscoso had the corpse disinterred, lest the Indians dig it up and mutilate it. A handful of men then stealthily wrapped the body in a shroud, weighted the burden with sand, and in the darkness of the night rowed out onto the river and dumped it overboard.

De Soto’s plan to build boats for bringing in reinforcements died with him. The men’s one desire now was to leave this country that had brought them only misery. But how? Remembering Narváez’s fate, they were reluctant to try to build enough boats to carry them home by sea. Instead they decided to march overland to Pánuco in northern Mexico. They clung to the decision for four months, fighting off Indians when they had to and living off the country as they had been doing ever since the landing at Tampa Bay. Then, as the subtropical growth began to give way to the desert scrub of south central Texas, they encountered, in a village of poor huts, a woman who said, or they thought she said, that she had seen Christians at a place nine days’ travel away and that “she had been in their hands, but had escaped.” Moscoso sent a squad of cavalrymen with her in the direction she indicated, but when she contradicted herself, or they thought she did, they abandoned the quest.

The Spaniards were losing heart. They could not live off this land of semi-nomadic Indians where little maize grew. As winter approached, the idea of travel by sea no longer seemed so forbidding. Wheeling around, they regained the Mississippi in two months of hard travel over the same trails they had come and in December seized, for use as their fourth winter quarters (1542-43), an Indian town (Aminoya) a little upstream of the one which they had destroyed seven months before.

Good timber surrounded the village, and the few artisans still alive had clung to their tools. They made more nails out of their meager supply of horseshoes and other iron, contrived ropes out of bark, and sails out of shawls collected from the Indians. To escape a flood that sent the river out of its banks, they put their horses on anchored rafts and saved themselves by climbing to the tops of their huts. Indians kept paddling around their refuge in canoes. Suspicious of their intent, Moscoso had one of his men seize a native. Under torture the fellow said that 20 chiefs of the surrounding tribes were conspiring to attack the invaders. A sign would be the approach of Indians bearing gifts of fish to lull the camp into relaxing its guard. When the native chiefs showed up with fish as predicted, the Spanish laid hold of them, cut off each man’s right hand, and sent the victims back to their villages to report that their scheme was known. Although some of the chiefs persisted in their intrigues, Moscoso, very much on guard now, was able to outwit them, force submission, and acquire through it all more heaps of shawls out of which to make sails.

By July the fleet was ready—seven brigantines and several Indian-style war canoes lashed side by side. They loaded the vessels with casks of fresh water and several hundred bushels of corn scoured from a countryside that could ill afford the loss. During the last days of work they killed and ate the poorest of the horses. The soundest, 22 all told, were put aboard, as were a hundred slaves. The rest of the Indians they had dragged along with them were turned loose in this country where the tribes were hostile to them.

The river journey was a series of violent, if intermittent, battles. Indians from towns they passed swarmed after them in canoes, raining arrows on them. Ten Spaniards and an unknown number of slaves died, and because the horses were slowing their flight, Moscoso at last put ashore at a defensible spot, killed them, and dried the meat.

After 17 days they reached the Gulf, turned west, and on September 10, 1543, after weeks of combatting fretful seas, contrary winds, thirst and hunger, 311 survivors (again not counting captive Indians) reached the Pánuco River. Said Elvas: “Many, leaping ashore, kissed the ground; and all, on bended knees, with hands raised above them and their eyes to Heaven, remained untiring in giving thanks to God.”

One of the most extraordinary marches in the annals of the New—or Old—World had come to a profitless end.

Piachi, Village in the Coosa Chiefdom

After crossing the Great Smokies, De Soto in August 1540 entered the territory of a rich chiefdom called Coosa. It dominated an area from the French Broad River in North Carolina into central Alabama. De Soto’s chronicler described this country as “Thickly settled in numerous and large towns, with fields between, extending from one to another, [it] was pleasant and had a rich soil and fair river margins.”

One of the subject towns was Piachi (the King Site to archeologists), on the banks of the Coosa River in northwest Georgia. De Soto and his expedition spent a day here in early September 1540. The chronicles are silent on the visit, but from the archeological work of David Hally and others, as interpreted by artist L. Kenneth Townsend, we have a good idea of life here.

Piachi was about 5 acres in extent, protected by a palisade and ditch. Inside were about 50 domestic structures and a central plaza with several larger buildings perhaps used for ceremony. Nearby were several tall poles, from which scalps or war trophies probably hung. About 350 persons lived here, less than half the number of the main town of Coosa or the substantial village of Itaba (Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site to the north). A good part of the villagers’ living came from growing corn, which they stored in cribs. As the Spaniards traveled from village to village, they expected the Indians to yield up food, guides, porters, and women. Without this sustenance, the expedition could not have covered the territory that it did.

Where the Fables Ended

Like De Soto, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado[3] was a younger son who improved his minimal prospects for worldly success by attaching himself to a patron—in this case it was the king’s fabulously wealthy viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza—and going with him to the New World. They arrived in 1535, when Coronado was 25.

Because of Mendoza’s position and character, Coronado’s rise was faster and more genteel than De Soto’s. Two years after settling in Mexico City (originally Tenochtitlán), he married Beatriz de Estrada, an heiress whose father had been the illegitimate son of Spain’s first king, Ferdinand. About the same time Mendoza arranged for his appointment to Mexico City’s governing council and shortly thereafter named him governor of the far northern province of Nueva Galicia. (The position was open because Nuño de Guzmán had been arrested for slave-hunting, and his successor had been killed while fighting Indians.) The only battling Coronado did during those years was putting down a revolt of black slaves in the mining district of Amatepeque. Though he had the rebel leaders drawn and quartered, a standard punishment of the times, he seems to have been more humane than many of his contemporaries.

Even before Coronado’s appointment was officially announced, De Soto’s agents in Mexico notified him that their employer had become adelantado of Florida. In other words, hands off ... a bluff, since the limits of De Soto’s jurisdiction had not been established. But the very fact of the warning shows that De Soto and his people were suspicious of how the winds might be blowing in Mexico.

They had reason to be. Mendoza had finally put together a reconnoitering party whose early entrance into the desirable area would give him a prior claim over either De Soto or Cortés. Take-off point for the group was to be Culiacán, an outpost on the western fringe of Nueva Galicia, 800 miles from Mexico City, that Guzmán had founded a few years earlier. The explorers were hurried across those rough miles by Nueva Galicia’s new governor, Francisco de Coronado, and a retinue of restless young blades looking for something to do. From Culiacán on, the scouts were guided by the black, Estéban, who had traversed part of the country with his owner, Andrés de Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca. (Mendoza had purchased Estéban from Dorantes after the three whites of the party had turned down the viceroy’s request that they take over the work.) Indians of the north—some of them had come to Mexico City with Cabeza de Vaca—acted as porters. Leader of this belatedly assembled group was a Franciscan friar, Marcos of Niza, assisted by a friend, Fray Onorato.

Fray Marcos, a native of Nice, France, spoke Spanish clumsily, even though he had spent time with Pedro de Alvarado’s forces in Guatemala and Pizarro’s in Peru, where he had become familiar with the astonishing wealth of the Incas. He is said to have been a good cartographer and to have written learned papers about the Indians, none of which has come to light. He penned such an entrancing letter about Peru to Mexico’s Archbishop, Juan de Zumárraga, that the prelate invited him to visit Mexico City and housed him after his arrival early in 1537. The impression he made led the archbishop to arrange his appointment to an important office in the Franciscan order in New Spain, and the Viceroy to make him leader of the search for the cities of the north.

Coronado and his escort covered the 800 miles to Culiacán on horseback, as befitted grandees. Marcos’s party walked, the friars in loose gray robes and sandaled feet. After bidding farewell to the governor at the outpost, the explorers and their Indian porters forged ahead on March 7, 1539. (In two more months De Soto would leave Cuba for Florida.) Fray Onorato soon fell ill and turned back. Undeterred, Marcos continued on to a settlement called Vacapa, close to the boundary between the present-day states of Sinaloa and Sonora. There he decided to pause while messengers summoned Indians from the coast, for part of his errand was to learn whether a big expedition could be supplied by ships.

Estéban refused to wait. Away from the friar’s restraints, he ceased being a slave and became a king. During his wanderings across the continent he had learned how to get along with Indians, speak their languages, win their gifts, and (we can suppose) entice their young women. But he dared not simply run away. So he said that as he advanced, accompanied by two huge hounds and part of the Indian bearers, he would keep Marcos informed of his gleanings. Unable to write, he devised a symbol that could be delivered by messengers. A small cross would signify that he had heard of a northern city that sounded moderately important. A medium-sized cross would proclaim a significant city, and a big one something truly superlative.

Presumably this tactic was devised to corroborate what the messengers told Marcos to his face. Told him—this man who knew none of the local Indian tongues and whose Spanish was not of the best? How?

Actually, it would have been easy, except for Marcos’s dangerous preconceptions. A long trade trail linked the jungles of Mexico to the merchandising town of Háwikuh in the Zuñi country of today’s New Mexico. Háwikuh’s middlemen trans-shipped along the trail tanned buffalo hides from the plains, turquoise from New Mexico, cotton mantas from the Hopi villages in Arizona, and bits of clear green olivine called peridot (the source perhaps of Cabeza de Vaca’s lost arrowheads). They received in exchange brightly colored parrot and macaw feathers and sometimes the birds themselves, plus coral and raw carved seashells from the Gulf. Flowing with the goods was a traders’ lingua franca, a melange of the principal languages the merchants encountered along the way—their own native tongue, bits of that spoken by the Pimas and Opatas of northern Mexico, Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztecs, and bits of Spanish. So there was a medium by which Estéban’s messengers, especially the one who brought a cross as big as a man, could talk to the eager friar.

From the cross’s bearers and from other informants along the way, Marcos heard of, and sent back reports to Mendoza, about the rich kingdom called Cíbola and its seven cities, one of which, he understood, was also named Cíbola. Terraced houses of stone rose three and four stories high. Doors were decorated with turquoise: clothing and ornaments were lavish. Near to this magnificent kingdom were others, equally rich.

Mere travelers’ yarns? Not necessarily. Consider who Estéban’s messengers were. They resided in small, trailside settlements made up of jacals built of mud-daubed sticks. In comparison, the terraced pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico, inhabited by hundreds of people who had sufficient leisure to attend to other pursuits than just getting enough to eat—such places, which most of them had only heard about from boastful peddlers, were bound to seem impressive. Talking through interpreters in signs and their lingua franca jumble, they tried to convey their wonder to Marcos—as did one person who said he was a native of Cíbola and apparently enjoyed bragging about it. While listening, moreover, Marcos was remembering the Incas and Aztecs and the legends of the Seven Cities of Antilia. Seven in Cíbola as well! Whose imagination would not be fired?

He never overtook Estéban. According to his report to Mendoza, he and his retinue of Indians had been toiling for 12 days across a despoblado (uninhabited region) and were within three days’ march of the city of Cíbola when one of the black’s erstwhile companions met them and said, weeping, that the Cíbolans had slain Estéban out of fear that he had come as a spy for would-be conquerors—as, in fact, he had. Two days later, the tale was confirmed by other Indians who had fled from Cíbola “covered with blood and many wounds.”

Convinced they were walking to their deaths, all but a handful of Marcos’s followers deserted him. With those few, he wrote later, he went cautiously forward until he glimpsed the city. It rose before his eyes more magnificent “than the city of Mexico.” And equally wealthy kingdoms lay beyond.

Deciding to rename Cíbola St. Francis after the patron saint of his order, Marcos erected a heap of stones, placed a cross atop it, and announced to the air that he was taking possession for Spain. Then back he hastened, “more satiated with fear than food.” So he said.

Skeptics have long argued that Fray Marcos never got anywhere near Cíbola. They point to the vagueness of his report, which nowhere describes topographical features, vegetation, or soil types, although his instructions had directed him to study all those things. They also insist that he could not have tarried in Indian towns and have made side trips searching for the coast, as he claimed he did, and still have reached and returned from Cíbola in the time known to have elapsed. And how could he have mistaken a relatively small, mud-plastered pueblo for a metropolis grander than Mexico City?

Supporters of the friar, unwilling to believe a man of the cloth could be an out-and-out liar, juggle time figures their own way and suggest that his impression of the pueblo was an optical illusion produced by slanting rays of morning sunlight and made more vivid by the mixture of weariness, excitement, hope, and fear with which he regarded his goal. They also point out that when a full-scale expedition marched north to take possession of the country, he went along. Would he have done that if his statements were lies that would inevitably be exposed?

It seems likely that he did turn back immediately after learning, at some distance from Cíbola, of Estéban’s death. But vanity and fear of consequences would not let him admit the truth to the Viceroy and the governor. So he concocted a tale out of the descriptions he had heard from Indians along the way—descriptions he believed, reasonably enough, were accurate and would bear scrutiny later on.

His temporal superiors accepted his statements partly out of an eager credulity of their own and partly because they were in a hurry to complete their claims to the Seven Cities. (De Soto was already in Florida; three ships outfitted by Cortés and commanded by Francisco de Ulloa were tacking north along the coast looking for sea approaches to the new kingdoms.) It has even been charged that the Viceroy, Mendoza, may have suggested some of the glowing details that were incorporated into Marcos’s report. Most certainly he rewarded the friar by pressuring the Order of St. Francis to make him, rather than candidates who had been around much longer, the father-provincial of the Franciscans in Mexico. As a result, pulpits began resounding with homilies on the work that awaited the pious—and, by implication, the enterprising—in the north. This of course stimulated recruiting, not only of idle hidalgos but of solid men with money enough to equip themselves and their followers for an extensive journey.

Mendoza reputedly put 60,000 ducats into the venture. Coronado added 50,000 that he raised by mortgaging his wife’s property. But they were not completely reckless. They ordered Melchior Díaz, mayor of Culiacán, to go north with soldiers and Indians and gather specifics about geography that Marcos had neglected to describe (not having seen it) but that an army on the march would find useful.

By February 22, 1540, less than seven months after Marcos’s return, Mendoza and Coronado had gathered the bulk of their army at Nueva Galicia’s drab capital, Compostela, some 525 miles west of Mexico City. For the place and times it was a brave show: about 225 cavalrymen, 62 foot soldiers, an unrecorded number of black slaves, and upwards of 700 variously painted Indians. The group’s equipment, like that of De Soto’s army, was a melange. There were a few suits of armor, including Coronado’s gilded one, some cuirasses, coats of mail, and plumed helmets but far more jackets of buckskin and padded cotton, high boots, and leather shields.

The Indians were camptenders, stockherders, and warriors, but not bearers, for unlike De Soto, Mendoza and Coronado meant to enforce royal orders that forbade turning natives into beasts of burden. Some of the Indians had wives and children along, as did three Spaniards, in spite of edicts against camp followers. Hardly noticeable in the throng were five gray-robed friars, including Marcos, who probably should not have left his new job as Father Superior so soon. Yet he, too, had a big stake in this trip.

Some 1,500 saddle and pack animals, both horses and mules, had been gathered to provide transportation. Many of the cavalrymen had more than one mount; Coronado took along 23. Each soldier was responsible for his personal gear, and since few hidalgos had the least idea of how to pack a horse, many impromptu rodeos occurred. But “in the end,” wrote chronicler Pedro de Castañeda, “necessity, which is all-powerful, made them skillful ... and anybody who despised this work was not considered a man.” In addition to the horse herd, there was a movable larder of about a thousand cattle, sheep, and goats.

Though Mendoza had planned to lead the expedition, the demands of his office prevented it, and he turned command over to Coronado, then aged 30. The next day the confused, dusty march began, over high hills and through vales full of thickets. Trouble awaited at Chiametla, where once Cortés and Guzmán had confronted each other over a ship. Resentful Indians attacked a foraging party led by Coronado’s second-in-command, killed him, and wounded five or six others. On top of that, in came Melchoir Díaz with discouraging reports of what he had learned during his scouting trip. Though heavy snow had kept him from entering the mountains north of Arizona’s Gila River, he had interviewed several Indian traders who supposedly knew Cíbola, and they had led him to believe there was little, if any, silver or gold in the area. And the road there, which Marcos had said was good, was very bad.

Rumors of the report leaked out and upset the soldiers. Marcos quieted them during one of his sermons: Díaz hadn’t gone far enough. A preacher’s word against that of a frontier roughneck. Coronado, at least, was placated: why let go of either his credulity or his investment this early in the game? But he was worried about dragging the whole cumbersome army over a bad trail into a despoblado lacking in supplies. So he decided to go ahead with a vanguard of 80 horsemen, 30 or so footmen, an unknown number of Indians, some livestock, and the expedition’s five friars. He placed the main army under; Tristan de Arellano, told him to stay in Culiacán for 20 more days and then advance to the Indian town of Corazones in the heart of Sonora, where further instructions would be sent him.

It took Coronado’s vanguard from April 22 to July 7, 1540—eleven weeks, counting rest stops—to cover the thousand miles that separated Culiacán from Cíbola. (During those same weeks De Soto’s hungry men were marching through Georgia into the city of pearls and on across the Appalachians into Alabama.) Hard weeks on rough trails. Contrary to what Marcos had said, they were veering farther and farther from the coast. Yet at that very time, Hernando de Alarcón was sailing northward with three ships loaded with supplies for him. How were they to make contact?

As events developed, they never did, and the vanguard crossed the shimmering San Pedro plains into what was to be the United States with an increasing apprehension that all gates were shutting behind them. They followed the tree-shaded San Pedro River north to the vicinity of Benson, Arizona, and then, with Melchior Díaz pointing the way, left it and worked on through a series of broad-bottomed, mountain-bracketed valleys to the Gila River, reaching it where Mt. Turnbull bulks huge against the sky. An enormity of space and remoteness. One can still feel it, for unlike the southeastern United States, where De Soto marched, this land has been but little scarred by man’s devouring technologies.

First Blood at Cíbola

At Cíbola, Coronado had his first encounter with the Pueblo world. His army was six months into the expedition and worn down from crossing a wilderness. Food was short, his porters (blacks) and Indians were deserting, horses were dying of exhaustion.

The first sight of Cíbola—the legendary kingdom of the north—dismayed the Spaniards. They found not a shining city of gold but only mud huts stacked one atop another and a crowd of armed warriors. This was Háwikuh, western-most of a cluster of Zuñi towns, now a ruin a few miles south of the present pueblo of the same name.

Wanting food, Coronado sent forward a party with an interpreter, friars, and cavalry. This is the moment illustrated by artist Louis S. Glanzman. The interpreter tells Háwikuh’s war leaders that the Spaniards have come to claim the country for King and Savior and wish them no harm. The Indians pay this no attention. An elder draws a line of sacred corn meal in the sand. The Spaniards hesitate. Arrows fly. The army storms the village. Soon a dozen Indians lie dead while the rest flee. The famished soldiers break into the stores. Peace follows and this pueblo becomes Coronado’s base camp for the next few months.

They climbed the rough Gila Mountains, found relief in high, open meadows, but then had to scramble over the Natanes Plateau and pitch down a steep Indian trail into the Black River gorge. On beyond that they came to a more difficult crossing of the barranca, as they called the canyon, of the White River. The water was so deep they had to build rafts to get across. Then on through more pines and meadows whose beauty they scarcely noticed. They were so hungry that at one camp they ate lush-looking plants—perhaps wild parsnip, perhaps water hemlocks—that twisted them with cramps; one Spaniard and two blacks perished.

Two days later, amidst bare, rolling hills, they passed the Little Colorado and started up Zuñi Creek. Knowing that Cíbola and its food supplies were near, the men wanted to hurry, but Coronado, ever cautious, sent out scouts under tough Garcia López de Cárdenas, and kept the main force moving slowly behind. Near midnight, Indians attacked the reconnoitering group and stampeded some of its horses. Quelling a brief panic, the invaders swept the Indians aside, but the portent was clear. The Cíbolans were going to defend their homes.

As the Spaniards emerged from a scattering of junipers onto a flat plain, they saw, hardly half a mile away, a low spur protruding from a line of hills. On top of the spur was a city of sorts. Blank tan walls rose three and, in places, four stories high. Clusters of people on top. Cornfields and squat houses at the base of the spur. “There are,” Casteñada wrote in disgust, “haciendas in New Spain which make a better appearance at a distance.” And he added, “Such were the curses that some hurled at Fray Marcos that I pray God may protect him from them.”

Points of view. Modern archeologists have discovered data about the Pueblo (Anasazi) Indians that were unknown to the Spaniards. For one thing, population in general was declining in the 16th century, but towns were growing because survivors were congregating in them, perhaps as a defense against raiding nomads. One major population center was the six, not seven, pueblos of the area now known as the Zuñi reservation, then called Cíbola. (No single “city” had that name; that was just another misunderstanding of Marcos.) The town of Háwikuh lay farthest to the southwest and hence dominated the ancient trade trails leading from the entire Pueblo country to Mexico, the Gulf Coast, and those parts of Southern California bordering on the Pacific. Háwikuh, accordingly—and all Cíbola—seemed important to the inhabitants of a considerable area, a notion Marcos had picked up and relayed to his superiors, as we have seen.

The Spaniards, however, had not come looking for dealers in hides, feathers, and imported sea shells. In spite of doubts and warnings that must have troubled them along the way, it was still impossible for them to adjust in one stunning moment to this thunderclap of reality. They went on doing what they probably would have done if the army of the Grand Khan had advanced to meet them. Cavalrymen made sure their saddle girths were tight, footmen readied their weapons, which had not been well cared for during the march, and together they moved toward the Indians, whose leaders drew magic lines of corn-meal on the ground and blew angrily on conch shell trumpets. With bows and war clubs they gestured for the invaders to leave. No women or children were in sight, and the numbers of warriors indicated that the neighboring towns had sent reinforcements. None seemed awed by the sight of horses.

Dutifully the Spaniards went through the ritual of the requerimiento. Cárdenas, a few cavalrymen, a notary, an interpreter, and two priests approached the Indians. The interpreter read a proclamation stating that God’s representative, the Pope, had awarded this part of the world to the monarchs of Spain. All who submitted to his majesty’s authority and also accepted Christianity with its promises of salvation would be embraced as friends. Those who did not would be treated as enemies.

The answer was a shower of arrows that did no harm. Coronado next went forward, holding out gifts as a sign of peace. Mistaking the offering for timidity, the Indians rushed forward. The invaders countered with a charge. Evidently the horses did inspire terror then, for the Indians broke and fled. Some were downed on the plain, but most gained the town and climbed onto the flat roofs, where they continued their gestures of defiance.

To Pecos and Beyond

Map: Coronado's March Through Puebloland

Marching from Cíbola to Pecos, Alvarado’s soldiers saw Puebloland in the morningtide of its history, a time of prosperity and relative peace. Village after village welcomed the Spaniards. At Acoma, built on a mesa, “the natives ... came down to meet us peacefully” and gave the Spaniards supplies for their journey. In Tiguex province, they met Indians “more devoted to agriculture than to war” who gave them food, cloth, and skins. At the huge pueblo of Braba (present Taos), more hospitality. Cicuyé (Pecos), their destination, greeted Alvarado with drums and flutes and plied the soldiers with clothing and turquoise (but the women kept hidden). The record is clear that when the intruders came peacefully, first encounters were not always hostile.

Perhaps there was no gold in the town, but there was food and the Spaniards were half-starved. Coronado deployed horsemen entirely around the town to prevent anyone’s escaping while he himself dismounted and led an attack on foot up the slope toward the pueblo’s single narrow, twisting entry. Clad in gilded armor that attracted attention (and must have been clumsy to run in), he was straightway knocked senseless by a huge stone. Two officers shielded his body while he was dragged to safety.

Advantage of position was with the defenders, and the Spaniards, we are told, were in bad shape. The strings of the crossbows, rotted by the sun, snapped when cranked tight. The arquebusers were too weak from hunger and heat to join the onslaught. Yet no one was killed and only a dozen were hurt. Within less than an hour the town surrendered, an outcome difficult to understand unless the defenders hurled their missiles so wildly that none took effect, whereupon they gave up, terrified by the enemy’s relentless momentum and flashing swords, a weapon they had never before encountered.

After Coronado had recovered from his concussion and his men had sated their hunger on Háwikuh’s corn, beans, and turkeys (which the Indians raised for feathers rather than food), he began assessing his situation. Couriers brought in delegations from the neighboring towns, and he put what he learned from them into a long letter he wrote Mendoza and dated August 3, 1540. It is a prized ethnographical document now because of its generally accurate descriptions of the Pueblos. Mendoza must have found it discouraging. No gold. But Coronado was determined, he wrote, to keep pressing the search. To strengthen his forces he sent orders, via the letter-bearers, for the bulk of the main army to advance to Háwikuh. The remainder were to establish a halfway station beside the long trail. This station was entrusted to Melchior Díaz. As soon as Díaz had put things in shape there, he was to ride to the Gulf in search of Alarcón’s supply ships. Fray Marcos, ill, disgraced, and fearing for his safety, went home with the messengers.

Meanwhile exploring parties had gone northwest from Háwikuh to lay claim to the “kingdom of Tusayan,” or, as we would say, the Hopi villages. Nothing the Spaniards wanted was there, either—except for ill-understood talk about a big river farther to the west. It could be crucial. It must flow into the sea and might furnish a route inland for Alarcón. Promptly Coronado ordered Garcia López de Cárdenas to investigate.

The result was the first sighting, by Europeans, of the Grand Canyon at a point generally believed to have been Desert View. Awed by the chasm, the party explored along the rim until thirst turned them back. Clearly such a stream could not serve as a supply route.

A few weeks later and many hundreds of miles farther downstream Melchior Díaz at last unearthed (literally) the first clues about Hernando de Alarcón’s whereabouts. After straightening out affairs at the halfway station named San Gerónimo, he led 25 cavalrymen and some Indians west to the Gulf’s torrid coast, driving a herd of sheep along for food. A swing north along the desolate beaches brought him to the banks of a river. He continued along it for perhaps 90 miles, until encountering Indians who showed him where another bearded man like himself had hidden some letters. The documents he dug up have since disappeared, but from other sources it is possible to guess what they said.

Alarcón had reached the river mouth about August 25, 1540. He had been preceded there by Cortés’s man, Francisco de Ulloa, who a year earlier had been trying to find an inlet that would enable his commander to beat Mendoza to the Seven Cities. Because Ulloa believed that Baja California was an island, he had been surprised to find himself pinched into the head of a gulf. A most disconcerting place—shoals, seemingly bottomless mudbanks, and a terrifying tidal bore, raging tumults of water caused when the inflowing tide rushed in a great wave upriver against the current.

The sight had turned Ulloa back, but Alarcón was more persistent. He worked a tortuous way through the shoals and, with waves dashing over the deck of his flagship, rode the bore into the channel on August 26. Unable to sail upward against the current, he anchored his three vessels behind a protecting point. Lowering two ship’s launches, he ticked off 20 men, some to work the oars, the others to walk along the bank, pulling two ropes. Eventually Cócopa Indians appeared, highly excited. None of them understood the lingua franca of his interpreter, but by signs and a passing out of trinkets, Alarcón in time prevailed on them to bring food and to help with the cordelling.

On September 6, two months after the battle at Háwikuh, the slow-moving boats reached, it is believed, a point near the junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers, the site of today’s Yuma, Arizona. Nearby, Alarcón’s interpreter found Indians with whom he could converse. Their news was startling. Far inland, white men were causing trouble among the native inhabitants. Coronado’s army, surely, which Alarcón had been directed to supply. But how?

When none of his own men and none of the Indians would agree to carry a message to Háwikuh, Alarcón decided to return to the ships, take on fresh supplies, and go to Cíbola himself. During the attempt he advanced one day’s journey farther upstream than he had gone before, but then physical difficulties and the growing hostility of the Indians forced him to halt. After burying the letter Díaz found, he returned to Mendoza with valuable information about the new land—but, again, no gold.

Having found the letter, Díaz continued upstream for another five or six days, perhaps to learn whether this was indeed the lower end of the big river about which the Hopis had spoken. Evidently satisfied that it was, he sent the Indian footmen of his party and the sheep across the stream on rafts made of reeds. Riders swam over on their horses, and the whole party turned back downstream. At some point in those grisly deserts, Díaz’s greyhound began tormenting a sheep. Díaz ran at the dog with his lance. The point stuck in the ground. Before he could stop his horse, the butt pierced his groin. His distraught men put him on a litter, recrossed the river (it is very low in the fall of the year), and hurried toward San Gerónimo, to no avail. He died and was buried no one knows where.

Of the Coronado party’s far-flung explorations, the one that had the greatest impact on its future was Hernando de Alvarado’s trip to the Great Plains. It was touched off by the appearance at Háwikuh, late in August, of a still undefined party of Indians—traders probably, but perhaps a group who felt they should learn more about what was going on in Cíbola.

They hailed from the pueblo of Cicuyé, located near a river we call Pecos in north-central New Mexico. (Cicuyé was the inhabitants’ name for their town; Pecos, now applied to both the river and the pueblo ruins, derives from Pekush, a word other Pueblo Indians used in speaking of the settlement.) The travelers were led by an elder whom the Spaniards called Cacique, as if it were a name. (Actually, it was an Arawak word meaning “chief.” The conquistadores had picked it up first in the West Indies and later had applied it to Indian leaders throughout Latin America.) Accompanying Cacique was a husky, talkative young man adorned with drooping mustaches, unusual in an Indian. Coronado’s people named him Bigotes, or, in English, Whiskers. Bigotes apparently spoke some Nahuatl, which meant he could converse after a fashion with a few of the explorers, notably Father Juan de Padilla, who seems to have been going slowly mad. Another attention-catcher among the visitors was an Indian from the Great Plains who had a painted picture of a buffalo on his bare chest.

Coronado considered the newcomers a peace delegation. He gave them glass trinkets, beads, and little bells that entranced them. They responded with head dresses, shields, and a wooly hide that, they signified, had been taken from an animal like the one pictured on the chest of one of their number. As the concept became clearer, pulses jumped, for here was a firm tie-in with Cabeza de Vaca’s story about the huge “cows” of the new land and of multistoried cities nearby.

Eager to learn more, Coronado prevailed on the amiable group to lead a party of his own men eastward to see Cicuyé and its surrounding lands—24 riders, four crossbowmen, Fray Juan de Padilla, and a lay brother, Luís de Ubeda. In high spirits they struck off through a malpais of congealed, jumbled, sharp-edged boulders of black lava that made the riders dismount and lead their suffering animals. This short-cut brought them to the amazing town of Acucu (today’s Acoma), perched on the summit of a butte approachable (as far as the Spaniards saw) only by a stairway carved into the pink sandstone. After an uneasy confrontation at the base of the cliffs, the Indians of Acucu invited them to climb arduously to the top, where they were heaped with presents of hides, cotton cloth, turkeys and other foods.

Acoma: Ancient Village in the Sky

Acoma embodies a thousand years of Pueblo life. According to an origin belief, the first dwellers were guided here by Iatiku, “mother of all Indians.” Archeologists trace occupation to at least late Basketmaker times (AD 700). A few centuries later, ancestral Pueblos are living on top in houses of stone and adobe.

The native word for Acoma is ʔá-·k′u, a word of ancient root that means “place of preparedness.” In September 1540, Alvarado’s men arrived at the great rock and marveled at the sight of the village and its people (about 200) on top. “The village was very strong,” said a Spaniard, so difficult of access that no army could assault it.

The Acomans came down to the plain ready to fight the Spaniards. But when they saw that the intruders could not be frightened off, they offered peace and gave them food and deerskins.

This illustration is artist L. Kenneth Townsend’s interpretation of the village about 1540—a world outside time.